Fox News, Tea Party Snookered by Own Stupidity

The first rule of chasing down a good news story is to get the facts, ALL of the facts, and then write a report that will get the attention of the listeners. Well, Andrew Breitbart, conservative publisher and big proponent of the Tea Party got the second part right anyway.

Breitbart found himself the proud owner of a tape of a black female USDA official giving a speech to the local NAACP chapter and, with a bit of creative editing, put together quite an incriminating piece of evidence against Shirley Sherrod, and then took it public. But to be fair, he says he only did it because the NAACP last week was calling the Tea Party racist, you know, tit for tat. Breitbart's video snippet didn't take long to make the media rounds and resulted in the termination of the USDA worker's job, which she'd held for decades. Since this report was written, she's been offered back her job.

The trouble with this kind of reporting is that it serves only one purpose, to try and get the goods on a group of people you don't necessarily like. In this case, Breitbart wanted to prove, obviously, that discrimination by blacks against whites exists because by doing so, he will be vindicated in his beliefs that allowing black people to be in a position of any kind of power makes them uppity. What he didn't count on is anyone would look at the whole tape and not just the part he felt was only relevant to make his point. One would have to surmise that by seeking out this type of scenario, Breitbart is less interested in Sherrod and more interested in going after the top dog, Obama.

The rest of the tape would have exonerated Sherrod, but hey, that's not what Breitbart wanted to do so that part of the tape was overlooked.

What Brietbart did do, however, is show that in the course of trying to have his gotcha moment, he actually made himself, his precious Tea Party Movement, Fox News and the other conservative talking heads a laughing stock. But, hey, he got one more black person off the government dole, albeit for only a day, and isn't what this is about? He must be some white person's hero right now.